In a dark time, the eye begins to see
August 30, 2017 12:49 PM   Subscribe

Anonymous asked: What's your take on non-binary/agender gender identities?

I think those identities represent one of the most important realizations it’s possible for a person to have.

I’ll tell you a story...
A brief piece on power, reason, art, love, and the body. By George Lazenby.

"I think the gender each of us ends up with (if any) is a reflection of how well, or badly, we are able to eavesdrop on the inner logic of our bodies. In this it has something in common with the talent for love–or art: A person who can understand what their body thinks is by definition one who also knows that rationality and power cannot and do not exhaust the possibilities of life. Moreover, a person who has struggled with him or herself in order to hear their self is a person who will fight for others. And this is now the logic of self-knowledge, a logic for which the intense seductions of silence under autocracy and fascism have already been vanquished, by listening."

---
A little context:

*George Lazenby is probably not George Lazenby's given name.
*Lazenby first came to prominence on Twitter. Roger Ebert was a fan.
*Lazenby is a non-practicing Mefite.
*Lazenby is currently working with @juskewitch and @erikk38 on a podcast called The Relentless Picnic.
*I've posted some of Lazenby's stuff previously (and previously and previously), but the Tumblr essays deserve attention on their own.
*Most are composed as answers to anonymous questions, like the one above the cut. Some seem to pick up in the middle of an idea, like transcriptions of the back half of a mental conversation. A few are recipes. There's quite a bit about Abraham Lincoln and David Foster Wallace, and a brief exchange of fire with Bret Easton Ellis.

---
A few more of those essays:

-Anonymous asked: What's going to happen with the Alt Right? Something to worry about, or is it just noise?

-Anonymous asked: i dont really get novels. why does everyone read them?

-valdemarlethin asked: Is painting dead, and if so is capitalism to blame?

-Anonymous asked: what kind of Holocaust memorial would you build?

-Anonymous asked: what caused your recent lincoln fascination? how do you feel about his probable racism? how do you reconcile the ethical black eyes of otherwise great human souls? which books about Lincoln are you reading? do you recommend any of them?

-maxwellmcl asked: As a philosophy student I've never found much time to dedicate myself to works outside of the canon. How do you do it?

-Anonymous asked: cant you just answer the questions that ppl ask you without going on and on about shit that has nothing to do w anything??

-You said: "Self-pity is considered a kind of unhappiness for which one is culpable, while depression is considered “caused” by phenomena." I say:

-Well, right, it’s very easy to feel defeated when the false becomes true.

-...but isn’t insanity only interesting to people who think it transcends rationality?

-Define your character in terms of hypothetical temptations you feel you would be unable to resist.

-Anonymous asked: why should i be a writer?
posted by Iridic (9 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
So, not this George Lazenby?
posted by Badgermann at 1:06 PM on August 30, 2017


It's probably secretly Pierce Brosnan Remington Steele.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:08 PM on August 30, 2017


But seriously, from the insanity link...
1. We tend to forget–deliberately forget–that people who are mentally ill are just like us, only moreso.
2. Nobody is keeping score.


That was a great description of a couple of Officially Mentally Ill people I knew for a long time. It was ultimately my own battle with clinical depression that pulled me away from them. I've mostly won that battle, but I have no desire to reconnect.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:14 PM on August 30, 2017 [4 favorites]


I knew non-Lazenby back in the Livejournal days. they had it together better than I did, and they're probably ten years younger than I am.
posted by pxe2000 at 1:14 PM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


Our instinct with insanity is to see the people affected by it as otherworldly; even traitorous, in that they look like humans but decline to swear allegiance to the reality we take for granted. The point is that there’s nothing alien about insanity.

is that right. maybe our choice of us-and-them terminology could use a little refining, in that case.

(I am not insane, but nothing ticks me off so much as being spoken to as if I am necessarily in a certain category of mental robustness simply by virtue of having the capacity to read some blog post. I await the day someone explains to me what this is a symptom of. it's got to be something. )

also, this all reads like an idea of "madness" gotten exclusively out of books. which is not to say that it is, only that it sounds like it. but the idea that the mad, so-called, are hyper-rational rather than irrational is useful the first time you notice it but it doesn't stay useful, it goes off after prolonged contact with the air. as an idea it is better as a mind-opener than as a final answer.

We tend to forget–deliberately forget–that people who are mentally ill are just like us, only moreso.

actually the really intensely distressing thing to be around is mental illness that makes its inhabitants into people who are just like -- I don't have the hubris to say "us" so I will say "me" -- just like me, only less so. not something extra, not one dial turned up too high, not too much attention paid to the wrong thing, that's all easy enough to fathom even if hard to talk to. but something missing, perhaps only stifled or disguised but perhaps really gone. but my point is not about what kind of insanity is my favorite, but only that there is more than one kind, if not so many kinds as there are insane people. even if you restrict yourself to different instances of the same particular illness. and the practice of distilling an experience down to an aphorism isn't well-suited to phenomena that have more than one essential quality and more than one way of manifesting.

There is no such thing as an alien feeling, only familiar feelings whose intensity incapacitates.

This is not true.

this is all giving me unpleasant R.D. Laing flashbacks. speaking of someone else who seems brilliant on first reading, and then you start to think about it.
posted by queenofbithynia at 1:49 PM on August 30, 2017 [5 favorites]


Well, it is from books and the piece gives examples as much. Psychology and sociology in various disciplines have tried to study social conformity and how that relates to the conflicts in the conceptualization of mental illness. Many a doctoral dissertation has been spent on that. Then the piece also mentions the Salem witch trials as an example and I'm sure American students have studied at least The Crucible as a piece of literature and social critique. Grappling with these meta-issues of "reality" is also the kind of thing that some professional psychotherapists have to do in their line of work, and they've written accessible articles about this (last piece I recall that touched on this was in the nytimes). All of this is recorded written material but the fact of the medium of discourse doesn't make it any less authoritative.

So nothing in that piece was that unreasonable, instead, I'd say it was rather predictable in terms of the points being made because there are multiple established connections that already exist and the audience of the piece is either aware and knowledgable of that context or not.
posted by polymodus at 3:01 PM on August 30, 2017


swear allegiance to the reality we take for granted This is a major point with me. I don't play well with others who are so intent on the game, they don't realize it is a game. People want others to take their, (insert here, hubris, style, politic, mindset, prejudices, views, myopia, social obsessions,) seriously, and fully invest in their RPG. Naw woman, man, how many people do I have to role play with in any day, just to have a conversaton? Not crazy, just not interested.
posted by Oyéah at 4:49 PM on August 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


Now is as good a time as any to plump for the Relentless Picnic, which started out as a Chapo-esque rant fest about the Trump era, but has really blossomed into an ongoing interrogation of the technology obsession and anti-humanism of the current moment, while still being funny as hell. (See the recent episode "Happy Nation" on, among other things, Ace of Base's origins in rescuing a guy from neo-Nazism.) They do deep dives on things like Citizen Kane, the nature of money, and the ~secret teaching~ of Leo Strauss. I highly recommend it.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:34 PM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


In rather the same way that art does not rely on the logic of power or the power of logic, its example allows us to see still other ways of thinking.

But can Art but put in service of power? The romantic conception of art, espoused in the above, has been troubling me for some time. Walter Benjamin, and his followers all seem to see this amazing "creative" and "utopian" vision in "art",but its often unclear what art in particular they mean and what about all the other art? The non-inspirational art, poor art, uncreative art. Or the Art in the service of fascism, religion, US Hegemony.

Is hollywood film art? If it was partly in the service of the CIA during the 1960s in order to advance a propagandistic image of the American Dream, in order to consolidate socio-economic hegemony, then can we really still depict art is some escape from the "logic of power"?
posted by mary8nne at 5:25 AM on August 31, 2017


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